Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Kirk Wisland on the Essayist's Conundrum: A 3-Sided Coin Flip...

Are we obligated to be goodpeople? Is good writing
tethered to good intention?

NO,I
would have argued vehemently in the certainty of my youth, in my black-clad
art-major days, splattered with plaster or acrylic, welding steel to steel. The
beauty of the work, its power—these the only guiding factors. We’re artists,we’rewriters. Was Bukowski a “good”
person? Hemingway, that rampant slayer of lions? Does William S. Burroughs
shooting his wife negate his brilliant work on the page? How about my first
writer-idol, Hunter S. Thompson—an exemplar of how to be in the world?

Surely the artist is libertarian. Or libertine?
Given liberties to live a little outside the lines in pursuit of the muse.The madness of genius, creative chaos, everybody knows that
writers drink too much.Choose your catchphrase. The artist owes us nothing beyond
devotion to the form, the writer unbound except by diligence to the word, the
line, the paragraph. Art for art’s sake—the “purist” argument.

Write like everyone you know is dead!This
blast of bravado was my perpetual refrain of advice discharged in the early
stages of my life as aspiring writer.Lay it all out there, get it written RAW, worry about the rest
later.

I cringe slightly thinking of that easy,
unearned certainty of the up-and-coming striver. How easy to make such
declarations from the safe anonymity of pre-publication. I cringe even more
thinking about one of those pieces I wrote in the last fading ebb of that
certainty, and the full-body nausea that swept over me when I realized my
parents—who are very much alive, and who I very much didnottell
about this particular publication—stumbled across it online. Damn you Google!
(note to self—trademark that phrase).

In my initial forays into writing nonfiction I
made the most obvious beginner’s error—I mistook exposure for bravery. In
Rawness We Trust. I continue my cringe-fest thinking of those early slices of
memoir—thepassionon those pages! How I reveled in the tales of previous
debaucheries—the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll of my early adulthood! And my
certainty that I was just the Gonzo-stylist to bring these epic blasts to the
page.

Except I wasn’tsayinganything.
I was just narrating, dictating my greatest hits collection. I bored into the
past like a termite, getting the details just right. I polished sentences,
flipped words, edited and re-edited and re-edited until each page was pristine
perfection of prose—diamond-sharp, glossy, slick. But I wasn’t thinking about
whatitmeant,
the “it” of the essay. I was just telling a story, these little slices of
memoir repackaged as showy big-budget productions starring flat,
two-dimensional characters—and a star narrator incapable of introspection.

This lingered on even into my MFA, where I had
for the most part (hopefully) stopped gratuitousness for its own sake. But
still I was afraid of full immersion into the “it.” More often than not I was leaving
these interior monologues off the page, the “meaning” hinted at in the blank
spaces just past the punctuation.

It was easy to get a laugh, or a wince, at my
own expense—the Word-formatted humiliations on the page not that different from
my oratory performance of these tales at parties and late-night campfires. But
it isn’t enough—no matter how well-constructed the prose—to just regurgitate
events. Capturing the weird moments for a child growing up with a gay father in
the 1980s isn’t worthy of space on the page until I force myself to answer the
question of what thatmeant,how it changed me, how those moments relate to a bigger historical
narrative, something beyond the particulars of detailed scene. Writing about my
early-adulthood penchant for infidelity isn’t interesting without
self-dissection, without a willingness to confront my lifelong fear of
rejection and consider how the anti-monogamy of my twenties was really just a
preemptive defense.No, I bomb YOU first…

Wait—do I have to answer the question? Okay…

Flip.

YES.Let’s say
yes we, as essayists, are obligated to be good people. If the essay is the
writer’s mind on the page, then it would follow that the lives we lead are the
basis of those mental gymnastics. As writers, as people who have a penchant for
the word, aren’t we obligated to use that talent to some higher calling? The
journalist, the documentarian, the Bono—aren’t we all, particularly we noble
Nonfictioneers (essayists, memoirists, et al)—obligated to apply our art to
something more than entertainment?

Ah, but here my fears, my superstitions, gets
the best of me. I worry about being pedantic or preachy, that my essay will
inevitably morph into didactic Internet screed, just another weary word-warrior
in the virtual army—read this and click
the link to tell your senator to stop being a douche-bag!I worry
that a need to write “to the point,” to focus my literary goal—much like the
dreaded “argumentative essay” of our freshman composition drudgery—will kill my
art. Because I still harbor a silly superstition that the words coming from
this pen at this very moment are somehow magical, that I am merely channeling
some ethereal energy, riding a wave that is not mine to control. This of course
might be the true problem—maybe I’m letting myself off the hook, avoiding the
hard work by imagining my pen as planchette on the Ouija board.

Part of this reticence is standard intellectual
insecurity—a fear of stepping into a ring I’m not yet ready for, of getting
caught trying to punch above my weight. When reading some fantastic essay by a
current or past master of the genre, I can’t stop myself from raising my gloves
and assuming a defensive crouch:not only can you not touch that—but don’t embarrass yourself
trying.

I also worry that my desire to write “bigger”
can lead to a kind of trauma wish-fulfillment—the subconscious desire to have
some meaty topic to stew on. The war correspondent’s disdain for peace. When a
close friend of mine drank himself to death a couple years back, I found myself
composing that story almost immediately. Even in the midst of near-debilitating
grief, the writer in me was paying attention, taking notes. Talking to the
paramedics, the landlady, calling the dead man’s parents across two time zones,
packing my things, driving from California to Texas, visiting friends in my old
desert MFA town—at nearly every moment of those first few days, a small portion
of my mental capacity was held in reserve, silently ruminating. Even while
chatting amiably poolside, that part of me was composing my private monsoon on
the horizon, a far-off rumble of dark clouds and encroaching lightning,
anticipating being lashed by that storm.

Because a part of me wasrelieved.That part
of me that had been struggling for meaning in my writing, that was struggling
to pick up the pen, questioning whether I wanted to keep putting myself forward
for further literary and academic rejections—that part of me was silently
thankful for the inspiration. For feeling like I had a reason to write again—a
story worth telling.

When I first heard that the recent shooting in
California had been perpetrated by a former student of Santa Barbara City
College—where I myself toiled two years back—I had a perverse desire to have a
connection to the gunman, to recognize his face, to be able to say that I sat
next to him or maybe even tutored him, that I was lucky, as a writer, to have
been in touch with evil. Just another war correspondent looking for a story.

Wait…

Flip again.

Maybe.Maybe
part of it is that I don’t have children—something I’ve thought about a lot
more in the last couple years observing the baby-boom among my friends and
colleagues. Sans children, it is easy to feel un-tethered from the future. What
would I write if I thought my children might read it in fifty years? What would
I writeabout,if I thought I might have descendants living is this world I’m
going to leave them?

Or to turn again to the other end of the life
spectrum, maybe I’m stuck on this question because I’ve been writing so much
about death. Other people’s deaths—the friend, and then in 2013 a young man to
whom I’d been a temporary step-dad some fifteen years back. (And now, weirdly
enough, I have just this month moved into the immediate wake of another young
man’s suicide—the balcony of my carriage house apartment the theater-box from
which I watch the subtle fluctuations of family grief play out in the carport
below, all the while feeling guilty for being unable to turn off my instinctual
observation).

How do we write the dead? Maybe that is the true
crux of where I’m at, the reason that my interrogators of goodness and intent
have been banging around like inner-cranial woodpeckers.Write likeeveryone you knowthe one you are
writing about is dead.I used to worry about writing the living—how would the costars of
this theater react to my interpretation of them? At least the living have the
opportunity for interaction—commentary, collaboration, correction. The
dead—barring their reemergence as chain-laden Jacob Marleys to confront us—have
no say, their existence at the mercy of the writer’s discretion. Maybe even as
I type this up I am subconsciously hoping for backlash, to be admonished, to be
told thatyes, in writing about these dead men I’ve known, I am committing an
act of betrayal, hovering like opportunistic voyeur-vulture. Maybe I’m just
looking for an excuse to not push through to the difficult finish line of these
literary slogs. A pass to go back to writing about junior high traumas.Did I tell you the one about my alcoholic band teacher? How about
the martial fury of the choir director? The Break Dancers vs. Punks lunchroom
brawl of 1986..?

Maybe it’s themaybe.The
questioning. Maybe by constantly interrogating our motives, engaging in
self-dissection, keeping the rock-tumbler in perpetual motion, we polish some
integral component. Maybe in the act of living as a writer, of being anessayist, we reorient and redefine
ourselves.

And maybe, in one final slap to the face of all
my previous certainties, I will break my longstanding ban on epigraphs and
end-quotes to finish here with the words of Montaigne, who first elucidated the
idea—and far better than I might—of how we craft ourselves in ouressais: “I have had to fashion
and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to
some extent grown firm and taken shape…I have no more made my book than my book
has made me.”

Kirk Wisland's wordsmith-ery can be found in
other places, helpfully compiledhere. He currently
writes and teaches in the Creative Writing PhD program at Ohio University, in
lovely (at least this time of year) Athens, Ohio.

2 comments:

Really wonderful. Thank you for writing about this. It is difficult to find someone who is willing to acknowledge the ethical implications of making the work public. I also appreciate the exploration of meaning in the work. It has to be more than technically great. It does have to be about something that offers some revelation of your truth.

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